understood, so I should like to make it crystal clear to our non-Catholic friends and also to refresh the memories of Catholics as well.
Mary is the Mother of God, and Catholics honor her as such. We do not worship her in the sense in which we worship God. Adoration is for God alone. But we venerate and revere Mary because of her great dignity and position. We know and steadfastly maintain that she is after all but a creature of God, and that as a creature she is possessed of no grandeur, no holiness, no power save such as her Creator bestowed upon her. Our veneration for Mary, great though it may be, is always on a level far below the worship and adoration which we pay to God alone. Adoration to God; veneration to Mary, His Mother. Yet this veneration can never be exaggerated, because it is derived from her dignity as Mother of God.
When we say that the Blessed Virgin is the Mother of God, we affirm our belief in two things: first, that her Son is true man, else she were not a mother; secondly, that her Son is true God, else she were not the Mother of God. As the great Cardinal Gibbons wrote many years ago: ". . . the better we understand the part that Mary has taken in the work of redemption, the more enlightened becomes our knowledge of our Redeemer Himself . . . the greater our love for her, the deeper and broader is our devotion to Him. . . . Experience also testifies that our Saviour's attributes become more confused and warped in the minds of a people in proportion as they ignore Mary's relations to Him."[1]
Today our country has need of Mary the Mediatrix, and it is only natural that we should turn to her for help, for we are hers in a very special sense. The United States was dedicated to her by John Carroll, the first Bishop of Baltimore, when he was elevated to the episcopacy in 1790. The Bishop's diocese extended from Maine to Georgia, and westward to the Mississippi; in other words, all the territory the United States then embraced, for Spain still held Florida, and the Louisiana Purchase was still thirteen years in the future. And the dedication by this saintly man, who was a living illustration of the fact that Christian principles are American principles, was more than a formality.
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- ↑ Gibbons, The Faith of Our Fathers, p. 45.
